Obama authorizes airstrikes, aid drops to address crisis in Iraq

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Adam Ferguson/The New York Times

Members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority are being sheltered at Bajid Kandal, a camp originally built for Syrian refugees. In recent days, more than 100,000 Yazidis have fled towns in the north that were taken over by the Islamic State.

FROM WIRE REPORTS

Published: 07 August 2014 04:48 PM

Updated: 08 August 2014 12:09 AM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama announced late Thursday that he had authorized airstrikes against Islamic militants in Iraq, returning the U.S. to a significant battlefield role there for the first time since the last American troops left the country at the end of 2011.

Speaking at the White House, Obama also said that U.S. military aircraft had dropped food and water to tens of thousands of Iraqis trapped on a barren mountain range in the nation’s northwestern region. The Iraqis, members of the minority Yazidi sect, were fleeing militants from the Islamic State group, who had threatened them with what Obama called “genocide.”

“Earlier this week, one Iraqi cried that there is no one coming to help,” Obama said in a televised statement. “Well, today America is coming to help.”

The president said that the twin military operations did not amount to a full-scale re-engagement in Iraq. But the swift advance of the militants has put them within a 30-minute drive of Irbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, raising an immediate danger for the U.S. diplomats, military advisers and other citizens based there.

“As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” said Obama, who defined himself during his run for the presidency by his opposition to the war in Iraq.

A statement from the Pentagon distributed shortly after the president spoke said that one C-17 aircraft and two C-130s had dropped 72 bundles of supplies to the thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority who had fled to mountains near the city of Sinjar after Islamic extremists seized the city. The supplies included 5,300 gallons of fresh drinking water, the statement said, an especially needed commodity in Iraq’s 115-degree summer heat. Several young and older Yazidis have died of thirst, aid agencies said

Two F/A-18 fighter jets accompanied the cargo planes, but no ground troops were involved, the Pentagon said. All of the aircraft had left the area of the drop by the time the president spoke, the statement said. There were no reports of hostile fire.

The U.S. move to drop supplies to the Yazidis came at the request of the Iraqi government, Obama said. The group, which has been targeted for years by Muslim extremists, had fled with little more than the clothes on their back.

Although Obama has authorized airstrikes, there had not yet been any as of late Thursday, he said. But a senior administration official said after the speech that as conditions in Iraq deteriorated in recent days, the U.S. had worked with Iraqi security forces and Kurdish fighters to coordinate the response to the militants’ advances. The official said the cooperation had included airstrikes by Iraqi forces against Islamic State targets in the north.

Kurdish and Iraqi officials said that airstrikes were carried out by U.S. planes Thursday night on two towns in northern Iraq seized by the Islamic State, Gwer and Mahmour, near Irbil.

For Obama, the decision to authorize the actions injects the U.S. military into Iraq’s broader political struggle, something he said he would not agree to unless Iraq’s three main ethnic groups agreed on a national unity government.

But the president said the imminent threat to Irbil and the dire situation unfolding on Mount Sinjar met both his criteria for deploying U.S. force: protecting American lives and assets, and averting a humanitarian disaster.

“When we have the unique capacity to avert a massacre, the United States cannot turn a blind eye,” he said.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina praised Obama’s proposed actions but said more was needed.

“This should include the provision of military and other assistance to our Kurdish, Iraqi, and Syrian partners” who are fighting the militants and airstrikes against the militants, they said in a statement.

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